Overhead garage doors typically comprise a series of hingedly interconnected horizontal door panels extending across the inside of a doorway. Each panel has rollers or the like mounted on stub axles at both ends, and the rollers are received in roller tracks at the opposed jambs of the doorway. The roller tracks extend vertically along the sides of the doorway. Near the top of the doorway the tracks bend away from the doorway and extend horizontally into the garage at a short distance below the ceiling.
Screen closures for garage doorways are particularly popular among householders who live in warm climates, and who wish to use a significant portion of their garage for various activities other than storing an automobile. Although screening has been used in overhead garage doors (e.g., the replaceable screen panels taught by Stansberry in U.S. Pat. No. 3,178,776), recent interest has been in the direction of placing a separate screened closure within or immediately outside the garage doorway so that it does not interfere with the operation of an overhead door installed on the same doorway.
These multi-panel slidably operable closures are similar to those widely used as patio doors, and may have either glass or screened panels. Individual upstanding rectangular panels of these closures roll on small wheels (usually two wheels for each lightweight screened panel) in individual wheel tracks in a tracked frame. Corresponding tracks in the upper section of the tracked frame at the top of the doorway receive the top of each panel. The top tracks are deeper than the bottom tracks and provide enough headroom for a panel so that it can be lifted upward into the free space above it and then swung outward at the bottom to remove it (e.g., for seasonal storage). The track frame at the bottom is made of a heavy gage material (commonly aluminum) and may have an adjacent threshold (e.g., an aluminum extrusion) so that an automobile can drive over the tracks without damaging them.
Commercially available multi-panel closures are manually operated. Installation of one of these closures can effectively deprive a homeowner of the advantages of having an electrically operated overhead garage door opener. The remote control feature commonly provided with electrical garage door openers becomes far less useful if one's garage doorway is also covered with a screened closure that must be manually opened. Moreover, if one opens the multi-paneled closure, drives out of the garage, remotely closes the overhead door and drives off, the open multi-panel closure is an unintended announcement to burglars that the homeowner is away.
There is thus a need for apparatus and method for remotely opening and closing both a multi-panel closure and an overhead garage door used on the same doorway.